for Jennifer ZetlanSoprano, String Quartet, Piano, 15'

What I like about Cavafy’s poems — and, specifically, Daniel Mendelsohn’s translations of them, is the sense of enormous distance between objects. I feel like the lines work well right next to each other as well as with enormous space between them. On Daniel’s suggestion, I set a pair of poems which are versions of one another; Voices is a refinement of the previously unpublished Sweet Voices. So the music, too, undergoes a process of refinement, and the third setting is a much faster, much more concise version of the first. The second section, Hours of Melancholy, employs a drone in some of the strings, while others interrupt and object to the voice. I love the self-effacing lines, “Mankind lauds the happy. And poets false extol them.” I set these lines in a sort of sarcastic, folksy way. I also wanted to take advantage of what I like to call Jennifer Zetlan’s athletic expressive power: she works well with quick text as well as slow, which is a special gift.

–Nico Muhly

Sweet Voices
Those voices are the sweeter which have fallen
forever silent, mournfully
resounding only in the heart that sorrows.